EDITORIAL: Wolves in the crosshairs

Legislation would undermine state’s recovery plan, public process

Legislation would undermine state’s recovery plan

Life has been hard for gray wolves in Oregon — so hard they were eradicated by bounty hunters in the early 20th century through a state-sponsored extermination program.

More than six decades after the last wolf was killed, fewer than two dozen have returned to Oregon, where some state legislators once again are intent on reducing their numbers.

Several bills currently before the Legislature could diminish the state’s tiny wolf population and undermine Oregon’s six-year-old Wolf Conservation and Management Plan and its modest recovery goals.

State lawmakers should reject all of these bills, with the exception of proposals that would establish a compensation program for ranchers whose cattle and sheep are killed by wolves. Oregon’s wolf recovery plan needs a tax-supported compensation fund that protects ranchers from financial losses and requires Oregonians, the majority of whom strongly support the recovery of wolves in their state, to share the burden of the cost of restoring their population. That’s especially important since a private compensation program offered by the conservation group Defenders of Wildlife will be discontinued this fall.

But lawmakers should reject the other proposals for new wolf controls. They include two bills that would authorize killing wolves — one when they are seen attacking livestock and another without cause. Other proposals would eliminate state endangered species protections and cut the state wolf plan’s population objective in half to just four breeding pairs.

These proposals are the modern equivalent of the state’s eradication plan of the early 20th century, when wildlife officials were so intent on eliminating the animals that they were paying bounties to wolf hunters into the 1940s — after most already had been killed off.

Oregon’s wolf recovery plan was the result of years of negotiations by a coalition of scientists, economists, conservationists, ranchers and hunters. It calls for a gradual reintroduction of wolves, with the eventual goal of four breeding pairs in both the western and eastern parts of the state.

Wolves have staged a remarkable comeback since the mid-1990s, when officials seeded central Idaho and Yellowstone National Park with 66 wolves. Since then their population has grown to nearly 1,500 throughout the Rocky Mountain states, where they have a vital balancing effect on the ecosystem, suppressing other predators such as cougars and coyotes, and strengthening deer and elk herds.

But the recovery has just begun in Oregon, where canis lupis first crossed into the state in 1999. With roughly two dozen wolves in the state, legislators need to give the recovery plan the time it needs to work — and for wolves to gain the toehold essential to their survival.